Animation beginner-question

Hello,

in the animation of an .mdl-file the animation is saved in frames, or?
Why is it important to have made the animations from bone or on the
other side from vertex-animation??
In the game I call the frames, and they are like .bmps,or?

I don't unterstand the importance why it's important, which animation was used for creating the animations??

With vertex animation you can change the position of each vertex per frame individually, this way you can change the SHAPE of body parts etc.
With bone animation you can move WHOLE body parts, even independently from each other, but you cannot change their shapes.
Bone animation, from what I have learned, is better for moving parts
and vertex animation is the better choice for animating shapes.

Thank's for answer.

But, if a call in the script an animation with framename and number,
it is equal for the engine, if I had made the animation before with an vertex- or an boneanimation, or??

the main thing about bones animation is that you can change bones angles and add bones position in runtime. you can't do that with vertex animations.

for instance, say you have a character holding a gun, pointing forward.
now the player looks up, and you want the character to aim up.
with bones animation you can simply change the arms bone angle with ent_bonerotate(), like
Code:

---

ent_bonereset(player, "arm");
ent_bonerotate(player, "arm", camera.pan);

---

also, the most commom use for bones is adding bones positions. for instance, you can have in your mdl scenes animating only the legs of a character, like 'stand', 'walk' and 'run', and other scenes just for the arms, like 'hold_gun', 'shoot', 'reload'.
then you use ent_animate with the ANM_ADD flag to combine the animations. you can't do that with vertex animations.

hope that helped to clarify a little...

Filipe

Thank's again for the help.

I start a little bit with blender.

Now I want to make a fightgame.
The problem is that maybe two models have to wrestle.
Easier is I think to animate the two together, or?
Then I would export the first model with its animation and then the other.
-And if the fall right or left, have I to make two different animations, or it is possible to mirror the animation in MED or Blender?

what u could do for the wrestling is have an animation for different moves like "SWING_LEFT" or "SWING_RIGHT" for each character and make them do random moves, or u can set them up in any order u like. never tried this before but it seems like a good idea.

best of luck,
Alex